New-born baby was sold on Facebook for Rs 800,000 (about $14,800) by his grandfather. Firoz Khan stole his grandson, sold him through a child trafficking ring and told his daughter, the mother of the child, that the child had died.
According to The Hindustan Times, police in Punjab say that a child trafficking ring including a hospital nurse and a laboratory technician, offered the baby’s grandfather Firoz Khan, 47, Rs 45,000.

The Telegraph reports that Firoz and a hospital nurse called Sunita, stole the new-born. Gupreet Singh, a hospital lab technician, acting as middleman, sold the baby to Amit Kumar, a New Delhi-based businessman. The deal to transfer the child was arranged on Facebook. According to The Hindu Business Line, Kumar agreed to pay Rs 800,000 after seeing pictures of the newborn on Facebook.

The Hindustan Times reports that Noori, the mother of the child, who separated from her husband in February, gave birth to a healthy baby at Satyam Hospital, Shingar Cinema road, Ludhiana, on April 3. According to the Daily Mail, on April 10, the nurse named Sunita and the laboratory technician Gupreet Singh, acting with the knowledge of the baby’s grandfather Firoz, took the baby away claiming it was ill and later told the mother that the baby had died.

Noori became suspicious, according to the Daily Mail, when some people came to pay her father (that is, the baby’s grandfather) Rs 45,000 in their home. She reported to the police that her baby was missing. The police launched an investigation.

According to The Telegraph, police investigators traced the child to Amit Kumar’s home in New Delhi and finally to Sir Gangan Ram hospital where the baby was being treated for an illness.
The Telegraph reports that Ishwar Singh, Ludhiana’s Commissioner of Police, said: “We acted upon the complaint of the mother, who alleged that her child was stolen from the nursing home in Ludhiana. After investigations, we found the grandfather of the child had struck a deal with a man in Delhi and had roped-in the nursing staff to smuggle the baby out of the nursing home. We have arrested four people including the grandfather. We have also booked the buyer from Delhi.”

The grandfather claimed he sold off the baby so that he can arrange a second marriage for his daughter after the failure of her first marriage. NDTV reports Singh said: “So he thought he should get rid off the child of her daughter from her first husband by selling him off.”

The case is only a “tip of the iceberg” of rampant child-trafficking in the country, The Hindu Business Line reports. Thousands of children are trafficked in India every year for adoption, forced labor, begging and sexual exploitation.
But the latest case is unique because it is the first reported case of child trafficking over Facebook or other social networking sites in India.